Puffin’s Place

I stole the title of this post from a sweatshirt I saw recently. Seemed fitting

If you are interested in any of the following, you will admire and enjoy James Lipton’s, Inside Inside [The Actors Studio]: excellent writing, acting as a craft, James Lipton’s unexpectedly—to me—intriguing life, the genesis of the Pivot questionnaire, a sprinkling of celebrity chat, Bob Kerrey’s tenure at the New School vis a vis The Actors Studio, The Actors Studio and Pace University, laughing a good deal, and a reading experience that is what such experiences should be: a joy.

You may or may not know that for more than a decade, Bravo TV has been broadcasting Lipton’s interviews with megastars in theatre as part of the academic program for students in acting, writing, and directing classes enrolled in The Actors Studio in its initial partnership with the New School for Social Research and, in the past few years, with Pace University. These interviews, lavishly covered in the book, are fascinating, insightful, and speak far more to the craft of theatre than to theatrical gossip. And at the book’s conclusion, a scattering of responses to each of the Lipton edit of the Pivot questionnaire offer both fun and insight into the minds of these actors and directors, and writers.

In addition to the really fascinating story of The Actors Studio, its origin and history as related to theories of theatre, Lipton includes a good bit of information on himself, his wistful and would-be beat poet father Lawrence Lipton, Lipton’s astounding experiences in Paris, his life as an events manager for Bob Hope and Jimmy Carter, his careers as dancer, equistrian, pilot, actor, writer, lyracist, and the list goes on. It would take hundreds and hundreds of his famous blue note cards to begin to catalog the amazing, comic, absurd, intriguing, and enlightening events in this fellow’s life. Just the narration of his experiences as an actor in soap operas is worth the price of several books.

This is a genuinely interesting book from so many vantage points that I lack sufficient chardonnay to get me through the list. If you have the slightest interest in learning something new, learning more than you already know, or reading a miraculously terrific take on a world you already know intimately, you’ve got to read James Lipton’s Inside Inside.